Saturday, November 17, 2007

Nuxhall of Fame

Joe Nuxhall passed away Thursday. He was most famous to baseball fans for his first appearance in a major league game: he was in ninth grade and 15 years old in 1944 when he came in to pitch for the Reds in the ninth inning of a game Cincinnati was already losing to the Cardinals 13-0. He got two outs but walked five and gave up five runs on two hits, including one to Stan Musial. He made it it back to the majors 8 seasons later.

After the pitched-at-15-years-old thing, Nuxhall is probably next most famous as a long, long-time Reds announcer, from the mid-60s until just recently. But sometimes forgotten is that he was a fine pitcher who had a long and productive major league career. His 135 -117 career won-loss record with a 101 career ERA+ gives him some very comparable numbers to, for example, Ron Darling's 136W-116L, 95 ERA+ career. Like Nuxhall, Darling also became famous when he was still in school (in a College World Series game in 1981 Darling pitching 11 innings of no-hit ball against Frank Viola, before losing on a bloop single, an error and a steal of home in the twelfth) and Ron has himself become a very well-respected announcer.